Month: November 2007

I don’t mean to look gift movie tickets in the mouth (does that make any sense?), but my friend Marie and I attended a showing of Robert Zemeckis’s mocap epic Beowulf for ASIFA-San Francisco members last night, and left without having seen the movie. For forty-five minutes, we and a few dozen other people sat in the theater, and never got more than three or four minutes of movie without crippling technical problems of one sort of another. So the projectionist had to start over–again and again and again.

During those few brief periods when we got more than about fifteen seconds of uninterrupted movie, it was blurry at best, and despite the fact that we were wearing 3D glasses, we couldn’t make out any dimensionality at all. (Marie and I are both glasses-wearers; it’s possible the 3D specs provided were a bad fit over our everyday frames.)

We wanted to see the movie–honest we did–but we eventually left, along with much of the rest of the audience. I’m not sure whether the showing ever got back on track…and if it did, how many people were left to see it.

The folks in charge of the screening weren’t very communicative about what was going on, so I’m not sure whether the woes related to the fact that the movie was in 3D, or whether gremlins had simply decided to muck up a screening that was designed to get some good buzz going for the film before today’s official release.

Looks like I’ll wind up paying to see this film; somehow, yesterday night’s debacle left me more curious about it. Has anyone out there seen it? Can you confirm that it’s not inherently blurry and generally hard on the eyeballs?

(Disclaimer: The blurry image below is a recreation for dramatic purposes.)